Chapter 15 Abbie
ABBIE
Saturday comes with the kind of weather that makes local news anchors practically vibrate with excitement, "Storm Watch!" scrolling across every channel, ominous clouds gathering over the Pacific like they're rehearsing for something biblical.
I wake up early, check three different weather apps, and decide I'm going anyway.
The canyon roads are already dicey. There's a storm coming. I could wait a week. The folded sticky note is in my wallet. If I don’t go now, I’ll find reasons not to go forever. So I go.
The drive to Topanga takes an hour, winding through canyon roads that get narrower as I climb. The sky is dark by the time I make the final turn. The address Gray texted leads me to a gravel driveway lined with California oaks, their branches already whipping in the wind. At the end sits a house.
Not a house. The house. A small house, weathered cedar and a wraparound porch.
I park. Get out. The wind immediately tries to steal my hair, and I have to hold it back as I climb the porch steps. Third pot on the left. I lift the succulent pot and find the brass key.
I let myself in. And I stop breathing. The reading nook is here: built-in bookshelves and a window seat wide enough to curl up on. So is the kitchen island at the height I sketched on a restaurant napkin.
The bathroom tile is blue-and-white Talavera, from the house board I shared with him three years ago. He saw it. He looked. Oak floors, hand-planed shelves, and a porch swing facing west.
I run my fingers over uneven grout and open the cabinet door that doesn’t quite close. He built this. He built this for me.
He built this from sketches and Pinterest boards and half-remembered complaints and everything I ever said I wanted that he supposedly never heard. I'm still standing in the living room, hand on the window seat cushion, when there's a knock at the door. I fling the door open.
Gray is standing on the porch with two grocery bags in his arms. He's wearing a flannel shirt that's completely soaked through, plastered to his shoulders, his chest, the arms I used to trace with my fingers when we were falling asleep.
His hair is dripping into his eyes. He's grinning like a kid who got away with something.
"I was dropping off supplies before the storm," he says. "I didn't know you'd be here."
I stare at him. At the grocery bags in his hands, the rain dripping from his shoulders.
"You didn't know."
"I saw your car in the driveway. I almost left." He shifts the bags. "But the power might go out, and I wasn't sure if you had food, and I'd already bought all this, so I figured... I'd knock. See if you wanted supplies. And then leave."
"You were going to leave."
"I am going to leave." He sets the bags down on the porch. "Right now. If that's what you want."
No loophole. No but. Just an offer, and the space to refuse it. The rain picks up. He waits for an answer.
"You're dripping on the floor," I say instead.
"Sorry."
"Go take a shower. Dry off. You're going to get hypothermia."
The grin comes back, brighter this time. "Is that an invitation?"
"It's a command. The floor is hand-planed oak and you're ruining it."
He laughs, a real laugh, surprised out of him, and steps inside. Sets the grocery bags on the counter. Trails water across the entryway as he heads toward the bathroom.
"Towels are under the sink!" I call after him.
"I know. I installed the cabinet."
The bathroom door closes. I hear the shower turn on. I stare at the grocery bags.
He offered to leave, though. He apologized. He told me he could go, and I told him to take a shower instead. What does that mean? What am I doing?
I turn on the television. The local news comes on. A weather alert scrolls across the bottom of the screen: CANYON ROADS CLOSING DUE TO STORM CONDITIONS. SHELTER IN PLACE ADVISORY OVERNIGHT. I read it again.
The bathroom door opens. Gray emerges in jeans and no shirt, toweling his hair, and I have approximately two seconds to process the sight of him, water droplets on his shoulders, the tattoos I know by heart, the way he moves like he owns every room he walks into, before he hears the TV.
"Oh, perfect," he says, and he sounds delighted. "We're stuck together."
"Don't." I grab the closest thing to hand, a dish towel, and throw it at his face. "Don't you dare look happy about this."
He catches the towel, still grinning. "I'm not happy. I'm appropriately neutral about this completely unforeseeable situation."
"You knew the storm was coming."
"Everyone knew the storm was coming. That's why I brought groceries."
"You planned this."
"I planned to bring groceries and leave. The universe planned the rest." He drapes the towel over his shoulder, moves past me to the fridge. Starts putting things away. "Besides, would you rather be stuck here alone? No food, no company, nothing but your own thoughts overnight?"
"Yes, actually."
"Liar."
"I'm not—"
"You're a terrible liar, Abs. You always have been."
"Stop acting like you know me so well."
"I do know you well. That's the whole problem, isn't it?"
He stacks vegetables in the crisper.
"You can't fix this with a house," I say to his back.
"I know."
"I'm serious. You can't just build your way back into my life."
"I didn't build it. I restored it."
"Oh, that's much better. You restored a cabin based on sketches I left in a drawer years ago. That's not weird at all."
He sets a head of garlic on the cutting board. "Four cloves. Should be enough."
"Enough for what?"
"Pasta. Unless you have objections."
"I have many objections. Not specifically about the pasta."
"Those are the ones I can work with tonight. Rain's not stopping for at least three hours."
"I noticed."
"You could sit. There's a stool."
"I'm fine standing."
"You've been standing in that exact spot for ten minutes. You're going to wear a groove in the floor."
"Your floor. Your problem."
"Fair point. Wine?"
"No."
"Water?"
"I don't need you to take care of me."
"It's water, Abbie. Not a marriage proposal."
"Don't joke about that."
"Sorry. Bad timing."
"Your timing has always been bad. It's one of your defining characteristics."
"I cook now." He slides a knife from the block.
"You don't cook."
"I do now. Have for about eight months. Turns out there's a lot of time in the evenings when you're not working eighteen-hour days."
"Is that supposed to impress me?"
"I'm not trying to impress you. I'm trying to feed you. Different goals."
"The cabin was supposed to impress me."
"The cabin was supposed to exist. What you do with that information is up to you."
"You did the woodwork yourself."
"Some of it. The framing, the trim. I had help with the roof. I'm not suicidal."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"It's supposed to be honest. The knife, please."
"Stop being competent. It's throwing me off."
"Would you prefer I burn the pasta?"
"I would prefer a lot of things that aren't currently happening."
"Name one."
"I'd prefer the rain to stop so I could leave."
"That's not up to me. Name something that is."
"I'd prefer you to admit that this, the cabin, the cooking, the whole domestic act, is just another way of avoiding the actual conversation."
"What conversation would you like to have?"
"The one where you explain how a house is supposed to make up for forgetting my birthday."
"It's not."
"Or all the dinners I ate alone."
"It doesn't."
"Or my father. The investment. Behind my back, like I was too stupid to handle it."
"It won't. I know that."
"Then why am I here?"
"Because the roads flooded."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know what you meant. The water's boiling. Give me a minute."
"Take your time. I've got nowhere to be apparently."
"There's bread in the basket, if you're hungry."
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since breakfast. Your stomach's been making sounds for an hour."
"You don't get to monitor my eating habits anymore."
"I'm not monitoring. I'm observing. Loudly."
"Did you just make a stomach growling joke?"
"Poorly, yes. I'm out of practice."
"You were never in practice. Your jokes have always been terrible."
"You used to laugh at them."
"I was being polite."
I fight a smile.
"You were never polite a day in your life. You laughed because they were terrible. That was the whole point."
"Maybe I had low standards."
"Maybe you liked me."
"Past tense."
"Is it?"
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Look at me like that. Like you already know the answer."
"I don't know anything. That's been made very clear to me recently."
"Sounds it."
He tips the vegetables into the pan and they hiss. "The pasta's almost done. You should sit."
"I should leave."
"In that storm? Your car would float away."
"Maybe I want to float away."
"Then at least eat something first. Floating is hard on an empty stomach."
"You're impossible."
"I'm trying. That's not the same thing."
"No. It's not."
"Sit down, Abbie. Please. I'm not going to lecture you or apologize again or make some speech about how I've changed. I'm just going to make dinner. That's all. Just dinner."
"And then what?"
"And then you tell me whether the pasta's any good. And then the rain stops, eventually. And then you decide what happens next. Not me."
"What if I decide to leave and never come back?"
"Then I'll eat the leftovers and learn to live with it."
"You make it sound simple."
"It's not. Trust me. But I'm done complicating things."
"The guest room."
"What about it?"
"You'll sleep there. Not with me, not in the same room."
"Of course."
"I mean it."
"I know you do. The guest room has clean sheets. I changed them this morning."
"You were expecting this?"
"I wasn't planning to trap you here."
"Could've fooled me."
"I've done a lot of things wrong. Kidnapping you with weather wasn't one of them."
"Fine. Guest room. Separate spaces. No expectations."
"None." He doesn't look up from the stove when he says it, which is the only reason I believe him.
"And tomorrow I leave."
"Whenever the roads clear."
"I'm serious, Gray."
"I know. Sit. I'll finish dinner first, if you'll let me."
Rain lashes the windows while garlic sizzles in the pan. I can count on one hand the times he cooked for me before the separation. But now he's here. Making me dinner. In a house he restored with his hands.
It's a lot. It's too much.
"It's good," I say, when he finally sets a plate of pasta and roasted vegetables in front of me.
"You haven't tasted it yet."
"Fine." I take a bite. It is, annoyingly, delicious. "It's adequate."
"Liar."
"It's acceptable."
"You have sauce on your chin from eating it too fast."
I wipe my chin. He's right. Damn it. We eat until Gray sets down his fork.
"Tell me everything," he says.
"What?"
"Every night you felt abandoned. Every time I made you feel like staff instead of a wife. I know some of it, you told me some, during the fight, in bits and pieces. But I want to hear all of it. From you. In your own words."
I stare at him.
"Fuck." I push my plate away. "I'm going to need alcohol for this."
From the second bag, he takes my favorite bourbon.
"I hoped you'd say that," he says, and sets it on the table.